I worked for a big semiconductor company that got into making calculators in the early seventies. At one time we had a technology exchange meeting with GM. GM was shocked that we simply scrapped an entire unit if it was beyond repair rather than spending valuable man hours to fix it. One of the GM engineers said, "We never scrap anything!" Maybe they should have scrapped some of those parts before they put in my Pontiac 6000.
In Canada GM received 6 billion to save manufacturing at a politically important plant (in toronto), during the global financial crisis. GM took that money to pay for labour and when it ran out, they literally closed their operations and made the Canadian government look like retards. Meanwhile the Japanese moved into Ontario, without subsidies, sourced all of the steel locally, hired local engineers and placed their factories next to some of Canada's best universities. Short story, Honda and Toyota saved Canadian automotive industry, employed Canadians, made great cars, and have amazing relations with the workers without having parasitic unions. Sadly, a lot of north American manufacturing management and unions were absolutely terrible and thats why soo much manufacturing left
On of the things Toyota does best, is it allows it’s assembly personnel to make suggestions on improvements, trials and then implements them if they work
@@smartelectriccarI'm pro-climate change. Deniers aren't helping sure. But stop taxing oil, protesting pipelines, and start approving fracking permits. The only reason I want an electric is because it's cheap. If we had cheap gasoline we wouldn't need to buy electric cars.
@@smartelectriccarAnti electric? They were the first ones to even bring hybrid and hydrogen to the masses. It’s not that they are anti electric, but they are not stupid like the econuts who thinks there’s enough power and a grid of being able to sustain going completely electric. Toyota has it right to offer a variety while trying to innovate to the next viable thing.
No offense, if you look at the American workers, too, they do all look like scummy C-grade students and high-school dropouts. The smug. Goes to show that under the right leadership and conditions, you can make a lot of dummies and vice-versa with a smart/diligent workforce put into a bad system/under bad management.
My father, a former long time GM district service manager, was working for Toyota when the NUMMI plant was new in operation. Everything reported in this video squares with what my father relates to me. He knew Toyota's quality was far superior to the big three of Detroit. It was undeniable, as the warranty claims demonstrated. NUMMI was a test of whether Japan could re-export Deming's quality expertise, originally implemented in Japan after World War II, back to the U.S. They could. And they did. The rest is history.
You mentioned Deming which is interesting because his name rarely comes up in conversation. I worked with associates of Phil Crosby and James Harrington for many years, and I've always been baffled by how little people know about TQM. The principles they taught me, such as Six Sigma, DIRFT and CAPA, have guided me in my career ever since... and I don't even work in manufacturing.
In 2016, when I was studying abroad in Japan, I went on a school trip to a Toyota plant in Aichi prefecture (in the city Toyota, renamed after the car manufacturer). After a whole presentation about the systems implemented, we got a tour through the assembly line. What struck me as most fascinating was how often the line would stop. Sometimes several times a minute you could hear the sound that indicated that someone had pressed the button and the line would stop shortly after. That meant that the line would only move for a few seconds before stopping again. It looked a bit like stop-and-go traffic. But the line would also never stop for long. Workers would only need a few moments to finish whatever work step they were on, and the line started again.
@@nick-zc9xv Didn't Tesla buy the NUMMI plant? Not sure if it's the one you work at. Elon ignores safety in his plants for aesthetics, so I'm not surprised that they don't stop the line.
@@nick-zc9xv No wonder Tesla scores so horribly low on mechanical production quality and longevity of the cars. Various Tesla cars scored worst out of 300 new-ish car models in Sweden when it came to the state of the car once the initial 3-year warranty is over. =/
@@taylorsutherland6973yeah, most American auto manufacturers needed to be put out of business ages ago. They’ve crippled this country lobbying for huge segregating highways instead of quality rail, especially within cities.
I worked at NUMMI one summer. They hired college students to work on the production line during summer vacation season. Had to join the Union. The training was very thorough. I worked in the body shop making T Posts (the frame part between the front and rear doors) and also rear wheel wells for Toyota Corollas and Geo Prizms. While there I did hear some stories of GM Fremont shenanigans including weed smoking and drinking. Good group of hard working people I got to work with there. They called me back to work the following summer but I couldn’t do it because I was taking a summer school class. I still wear a scar I got at NUMMI. I was holding onto a part that was getting a repair weld and a welding spark landed between my glove and protective arm cover.
14:00 This is an often cited story. However, in Spanish, the word "nova" and the phrase "No va" have two different meanings, just like "notable" and "no table" in English. The original production run of the 1962-1979 Chevrolet Nova was a very popular compact rear-wheel drive car. That popularity didn't transfer over to the new front-wheel drive version based on the Toyota Corolla which was also built at NUMMI, so the car was rebranded as the Geo Prizm and later as the Chevrolet Prizm when General Motors discontinued the Geo make.
Thank you. The video producers clearly never fact-checked their assertions before committing it to video. Also note the Novas and Corollas built at NUMMI were the EXACT SAME VEHICLE with different badging. Ditto the later Geo Prism, then the Chevrolet Prism. This whole "Production" segment of the video was blatantly incorrect and casts doubt about the veracity of any of the other information in this video. Do better.
So, GM was having problems with the plant because their workers felt that management didn't care about them or what they thought, and therefore decided to raise hell. Toyota comes in, and fixes that in an instant by just giving the workers what they wanted: more agency. Wow, it's almost like if you treat your workers like human beings they actually do good work, so weird.
And then look what happened after Tesla took over… build quality went back to sh**, and worker pay and morale is low again ( I know a few who have tried working there and gave up)
O rly🤨? Is that the whole story now? Our lexicon needs a new word. I nominate idiology. Either that or maybe shill works. Depends on whether you believe that over simplified one sided story of yours or your just hawking it for undisclosed reasons.
They applied the DEMING METHOD, like all Japanese companies and even the public functions in Japan. American statistician Edwards Deming taught the Japanese how to build in Quality and Continually Improve the Process when he was part of General MacArthur's team that re-organized and re-constituted Japan post WWII. To this day the Japanese award an annual Deming Award to the company or department that has the best Process Improvement of the year. Prior to Deming "made in Japan" meant what "Made in China" means today. The Japanese were not happy with this state of affairs and gladly absorbed Deming's Methodology. Meanwhile, American industry was NOT INTERESTED. The rest is history.
It seems American, Chinese, and increasingly European manufacturers are not interested. It seems they only want revenue from garage support and new sales as soon as the original warranty expires, instead of building up a reputation of reliability.
This is why no one with a brain buys American cars..(total junk) the big 3 can't even build a reliable power train... they will all go bankrupt again, Toyota is already pivoting into our current economic reality, creating lower cost high quality products worldwide that will all last 200k miles,
Thanks for bringing this little known story (outside of the Bay Area) to light. I worked 18 years across the i880 from NUMMI/Tesla factory and drove one of the last NUMMI Tacoma. Great car, never had any issues with it.
Yeah probably some first generation sold in the Middle East by terrorist as they use pickup trucks made in California could be odd, but Freemount had made vehicles for terrorist.
Earlier this year, the production facility I work at in the UK (electronics) brought in Nagamatsu san, one of the guys who implemented the whole lean/just in time process at Toyota. It was a Shingijutsu Kaizen and was good fun if a bit of a steep learning curve. An honour to work with Nagamatsu san.
Sir, a very good video, I know that this GM plant was bad, I just didn't know it was horrible. Japan has a very good reputation for quality, but that was not always the case. Before WWII Japan was frankly known for junk. After WWII a man by the name Dr. William Deming, a quality expert and a professor from M.I.T. went to the American auto companys and wanted to show them statistical analysis and how it would improve car quality. They were not interested, becauce they could sell every car that came off the line. So then Dr. Deming approached the Japanese auto companies and they happily embraced the man and his knowledge. There is even a statue of him there. Statistical analysis is what you profiled in your video, seeing a problem and fixing it on the spot and treating quality as an never ending job. You might want to do a video on Dr. Deming and how he transformed Japan manufacturing. Only after losing great amounts of market share becauce of the Japanese dlid the Big 3 auto companies here start to imbrace iS.A. in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Much Success.
"Did you know that they found coke bottles in American built cars?" "Grandpa please you're just exaggerating." Grandpa was right, but required a bit more context. Dang though yeah, the intro sounded like a nightmare to be in for everyone.
The first Honda in the USA was so bad that no one would buy it. It was cheap, so I went to see it at a dealer. The shift knob came off. The clutch would only shift into 1st gear and the brakes didn't work at all. But it was cheap. It took them 10 years to get their schiesse together, and now they're the 2nd best auto in the world, right behind Toyota.
Whatever manufacturing share was lost GM still sold more cars annually in the United States than anyone else for 90 years, until Toyota finally bested them at managing covid supply chain issues recently. The first time in 90 years that GM wasn't the number one auto manufacturer by sales volume in the United States.
@@gooser__43 when it comes to foreign brand presence Toyota Honda Nissan and Hyundai / Kia are at every intersection here in volume. Not mostly Toyotas and some Hyundai's and Kia's. Regardless what we see at the intersections is irrelevant to the fact that GM was the dominant auto manufacturer by sales volume annually in the United States for 90 years, only just being bested by Toyota for the first time because Toyota better managed their supply chain issues that were brought about by the whole covid fiasco. It is what it is. For 90 years GM sold more cars in the United States annually than any other manufacturer, beginning in 1931. "WASHINGTON, Jan 4 2022 (Reuters) - Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) outsold General Motors Co (GM.N) in the United States in 2021, marking the first time the Detroit automaker has not led U.S. auto sales since 1931. Toyota sold 2.332 million vehicles in the United States in 2021, compared to 2.218 million for General Motors, the automakers said Tuesday. GM's U.S. sales were down 13% for 2021, while Toyota was up 10%. For all of 2020, GM's U.S. sales totaled 2.55 million, compared with Toyota's 2.11 million and Ford's 2.04 million."
At the same time, all of this was going on at GM I was working in a wood products factory on the west coast. The company brought in the same Toyota management system: Total Quality Management and Just in Time production. We got all the special training, tools, management support, etc. We did the pre-shift stretching exercises and the special quality control crew meetings. I learned skills and concepts that I still use these many years later. What happened? Our union was resistant and slow-walked at every turn. Ultimately, the plant was sold to a non-union company, and many people lost their jobs and had to re-apply for the new company. The union mentality killed the entire concept. How sad.
In my industry, unions are not unheard of, but extremely uncommon. Every union-run org I know of sounds terrible to work for based on stories I've heard. In this business it's very common for people to move around to other orgs, but union shops get avoided like plague, because you are guaranteed to have a bad time. My theory is that now that they're union shops, they can only get the worst of the worst to take a job working with them, thus making the union necessary and the toxic relationship between management and staff self-perpetuating. The proper solution is ejecting everyone and starting over, which occasionally happens, if they get absorbed in a merger with a larger non-union org.
I get that unions are protection and supposed to lift wages and whatnot. But overall I see a lot of unions just prevent companies from changing anything, changing layout and processes in a plant in an attempt to improve efficiency but stonewalled by the union. Crappy employees that do the minimum or nothing but keep their job. Pushing management away and creating antagonism. Seems to me like a fair few protections could actually be accomplished with law, we have sick time requirements in many states, we could add PTO and other benefits, wage I think usually sorts itself but raising the floor (minimum wage) raises everyone's wage for the most part.
It's sad that while Unions have a noble cause, the second they gain any power it inevitably turns into massive corruption and no longer about the worker.
@@Jaker788 I think our institutions meant to protect to the worker are corrupt and weak. FLSA got watered down and the NLRB seems quite weak. There really is no alternative. I think Unions probably should have a profit sharing with the company to encourage development and updating stuff.
Hey, I worked at this very factory for a short while in 2019! Tesla gave me 3 days of training and then set me loose, much different than what you described at Toyota.
@@MiGujack3 More like glorified refrigerators. But then, I have a 40 year old "beer fridge" that's NEVER STOPPED WORKING. The batteries ... hmm, you have FACTS to back that up? No, didn't think so. Like PV panels or Intel processors, battery tech is improving at a tremendous pace. It's just you whiners don't mind if your phone is faster and better, but don't touch your noisy, smelly, expensive pickup!
@@capnkirk5528 You do know that when the EV battery loses it's efficiency to 80% charge it has to be replaced, for $4,000-$12,000? That's why smart people sell their 3-5 year old EVs to stupid people.
Another (apocryphal?) sub-story: after the plant was running, GM sent a team of production specialists to ovserve operations, and bring lessons back to GM management, supposedly for disemmination. They became admirers of the system and culture. When they brought the lessons back to GM, they were not well accepted. Rather than stay with GM and watch inferior ideas be propagated, most of the analysis team quit to work for Toyota.
well, Western management is the culprit. In some industries, owners treated workers so poorly for several generations that unions massively grew in power.
@@PainterVierax I think the term you are looking for is "American management". I live in a small Euro country with strong unions, and stuff like workers having influence over production and managers using the same cafeteria are obvious, not something exotic.
@@ThePhiphler well, socialism and unions started in Europe cities during the industrial revolution (the novel Germinal occurred in France). American management (which btw is more and more prevalent across Europe) aggravated the tensions, industry unions and union shop are more common in NA as well. But the issue is just the result of liberal capitalism where workers are considered as a disposable resource to exploit, not far from slavery. Many legislation across EU changed in consequence, forcing companies to get back to caring about employees, whereas NA stayed more liberal therefore more conflictual between holders and the workforce.
@@PainterVierax I believe that studies show that a flat management structure actually makes your business more competetive and earns more money. It's a question about what the managers expect, if they are to behave like barons or not.
And only thing GM (Garbage Motor) can do is brainwash people with Real People BS. Looks at how horrible Cadillac Escalade is compared to a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen and even Lexus LX and Toyota Land Cruiser are more exciting than a piece of shit Cadillac.
I highly recommend you guys to watch the Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho (1986). It's basically what this video is all about. It's a comedy about the cultural change/clash in an US-Autoplant which was taken over by a Japanese car manufacturer.
How about _Blue Collar (1978)_ ? There is no Japanese element but provides a very raw insight into the bureaucracy and dysfunction in a Detroit auto plant.
Reminds me of the movie 1986 Gung Ho where a Japanese executive is "exiled" to the USA as punishment and has to bring an American auto production plant up to Japanese efficiency standards. Great movie.
I worked a the tesla plant and learned the lore and history. Thanks for the review. This plant has a wild history and also has some pretty neat legacy infrastructure - like the abandoned paint ovens on the roof.
I interned at Tesla as a quality engineer at the Fremont plant and met an engineer who used to work at NUUMI. They flew him out to Japan to get trained and learn the Japanese ways. Crazy to see a guy like him coming back to the factory he once worked at before.
And now they make crappy Teslas. Still Uhion, still making crap. The Testa is only average in reliability and people don't keep these silly EV's long, especially since there are no huge rebates anymore. Think of it! A Tesla has hardly any critical engine parts, no radiator, no starter, no engine, no transmission, no cooling system and yet, they are "average".
I remember being told about this plant and its history a few years ago. My girlfriend’s uncle is a long time service manager at a northern VA Chevy dealership and I had a conversation with him about American car quality vs Japan. Toyota in particular. He told me basically everything that you outlined here and I took that knowledge with me to my part time job at CARMAX. They used to call me Mr Toyota because I only sold used Toyota products. If they couldn’t afford it I would sell them a Honda or Mazda. I just didn’t want my customers to be weighed down by a car that will constantly break and eat their wallet. I think out of the 4 years I was at CARMAX I only sold two American cars.
@@joanfrederick9176Ford almost had me, and they're like the Republicans who strive desperately to lose every election by waiting till the last minute and announcing they're on a platform of abortion. So, I researched and wanted to buy a Ford Maverick hybrid. Good price, good reliability and yet, every dealer wanted to reape me and lied to me and made it so hard to buy I instead just said "no". They almost had me, and they screwed it up.
@@TheAleksander22 From what I understand, the GM jobs were broken down so small that not much training was needed to do the job with any proficiency. Did you watch the part about 20 % absenteeism , 7,000 grievances , random unauthorized strikes and generally labor trying to sabotage the company? How about this, in one GM stamping plant ( not Freemont ) it took a shift plus to change a large stamping die. Faced with a possible plant closure, a few physical changes were made along with " don't be a union worker sleeping on the job " . Die change out was reduced to 45 MINUTES !!!!! I got this information DIRECTLY from the guy that redesigned the process and implemented the changes.
@@TheAleksander22 Also, having worked for a major consumer goods Japanese company, much of Japanese company culture / training has nothing to do with the specific job the person will be doing. It has to do with things like problem solving , getting along with others. In other words ,respecting others and not being a di. . . .k .
My outstanding Toyota Tacoma was built by NUMMI and it has been the most reliable vehicle I have ever owned (still going strong after 22 years and 220,000 miles). You think GM would have learned something from Toyota regarding quality, but sadly that has not been the case.
Years ago I worked at Hewlett-Packard in Britain (before the company lost its way after the retirement of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard). There was a lot in common with the NUMMI approach: Single cafeteria and parking lot for all employees, from site manager to toilet cleaner. Small teams working to get consensus on how to do things. The realisation that it is better to stop production than to continue manufacturing products with defects.
One thing not mentioned, during the time they were making Novas and Corollas on the same assembly line, Corollas were out selling Novas three to one. They were exactly the same car except for badging. That’s why GM bailed. It was at that time Toyota started to build the pickups which were very profitable for them. I worked at one the feeder shops making seat frames for Johnson Controls, and frame brackets for Dana. When demand increased for the trucks, they moved assembly to Texas where they could get cheaper labor, and take advantage of the even cheaper labor of Mexico. This move not only effected the thousands of workers at NUMMI, but also 3 times more of local suppliers. The cost of doing business in California not only affected GM, Ford and Chrysler had the same problems. It’s only a matter of time before Tesla will do the same.
My 2009 nummi made pontiac vibe is still doing well in the familly, i bought it new, sold it to my girlfriend who sold it back to my brother who still drive it...used it this summer and boy, that car still got a lot of life in it! I paid around 20k for it in april 2008...impressing! That car sure sold a lot of future toyota for my familly!
Vibe=RAV. Best kept secret in the industry. Like the Dodge D50 pickup truck, which was really made by Mitsubishi. I would never buy an small American truck unless it was a re-badged Japanese car.
Vibe is more like the Matrix, not rav. Back in early 2009 during depth of the GFC, Pontiac was one of the brands being shuttered and you could have had a Pontiac Vibe for less than $10k…. Good old days before feds started QE and all the associated inflation.
The Geo Prism was a JDM Corolla model adapted for the North American market. Why they didn't use the exact same model as the Corolla already built for North America and just swap badges I don't know. Most of the major parts were the same though, but there were differences deeper than the badges, and also some part bleed into North American built Corollas. One major downside was that a NUMMI or Canadian Corolla with the 1.8L engine got a Delco alternator instead of the Denso alternator Toyota used in other markets with the 1.8. Ask me how I went through 3 of those piece-of-shit Delco alternators in my Canadian build 90s Corolla... Fast forward a decade and my newer mid-2000s Corolla built at NUMMI had a Delphi computer in it, which had to be replaced under recall, because GM used substandard solder on them.
Late 1940s, W. Edwards Deming is the man who taught Japan quality. After World War II, Deming visited Japan and at the request of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) gave a series of lectures on quality control to Japanese engineers and to top management on management's tasks and responsibilities.
NUMMI made the Corsica I got up to 252,000 miles. Extremely impressive for an American small car built in 1992. I always thought it was a Camry with cheap GM parts glued on.
NUMMI had absolutely nothing to do with the Corsica - do you mean Corolla? Wiki says the Corsicas were built at Wilmington Assembly in Delaware and Linden Assembly in New Jersey. They were pure GM dreck - Under-Engineered, badly built American rubbish 🤮
NUMMI did not build your Corsica. I had a 1993 for my first car. Had 110k miles with lots of problems. Overheating, random engine stalls coming to a stop, electrical issues, etc. I can't imagine the amount of money you spent to maintain that pos.
@@Gobinator98 No kidding? Plastic bits kept breaking off it all the time. I spent practically nothing on maintenance. Just drove it into the ground. Was so impressed I bought one Cavalier after another, both with the throaty 2.2L engine, both died around 150k. Afterward I went Japanese and never looked back.
I bought a new 1995 Corsica, it needed a new engine at 20k miles, and the transmission went out at 45k miles, needless to say I've driven nothing but Toyota ever since.
I was given a private tour of this plant in the early 90s by the plant manager as my uncle was friends with him. It was run by Toyota then of course. Incredible to see and extremely well run
Very interesting video! I had an 07 Corolla assembled at Nummi Fremont that was very well made, 200k miles of trouble free driving. It was still running great when I traded it in for a newer model.
I obtained a masters from the University of Washington. Most of what I remember is from the Toyota Management System. It made it fun to learn as I have always been obsessed with the Japanese and their culture.
@@kingjoe3rdNah he's right, its a fascinating and unique country/people/culture. We're all aware of the exaggerated problems as its everywhere on UA-cam since its trendy now to be anti-weeb or whatever it is. Got stationed in Japan for some years and thought it was a cool country with awesome people. Some of us don't care about anime but can respect the culture of attention-to-detail and pride in craftsmanship so many nations lack
I never really understood scrum, the college I went to really tried to push it onto us (or simulate it) and it failed horribly. A real company that offers internships did a big presentation about scrum to show it to us and it was awful, it sounded like corporate speak to me.
@@MiGujack3 Got to keep in mind they're systems designed to whip unionised boomers into something resembling an effective workforce. If you're born with half a brain and use it, you outperform those by default and the system won't work on you since you don't exhibit the problems it's meant to fix. Scrum appoints 'owners' out of a group of boomers who by default won't care at all and uses them as directors to find faults within work for example. You NEED that if people are passive. To give you an example I was hired for 4 months into a Dutch municipality, a city. Each year they lost money and their thinking proces ended with 'report the losses', finance didn't redirect their problem to the workfloor and those didn't care. This built up until they lost 6% of all (taxpayer!!) money put into that department, which was their own property portfolio, their real estate, their facilities. So I was hired externally and set about diagnosing the problem. What I found was lazyness, passivity, corruption and stupidity. THE major thing was they never redistributed utilities to the utilities company, to give you an idea those were privatised in 1994, I was hired in 2016. All those years they had paid taxes (mainly to the waterboard and province) on those objects. Some objects were outright filed incorrectly, like an boomer idiot registering a sluice gate as a building and then getting it taxed, or adding "I dunno, lol, I'm a union member, I don't care" when asked if a sports pitch had drainage, prompting the waterboard to tax it as drained. I filed on average 650 tax protests a week every week and the waterboard soon had two fulltime employees working just me protests. In all that time I lost a single case, won all the others. On average I reduced the annual financial burden by € 22800 a week. For this efficiency I was ridiculed by boomer unionised workforce, with one saying quote "Why are you upset at losing your first case? You get paid regardless of the outcome." The concept of being the owner of your work was alien to that person, while I took the unjust ruling as almost an insult and pushed out an extra 200 cases that week. When a shitty job landed within my team, it was given to the only junior in the room. I stepped up to shield him from it even though it wasn't stricly my job, but I could use a change. Then I was overstepped by a 61 year old unionised boomer who said, quote "Oh just give that to me. I won't do it and I'm 61 so they can't fire me.", the work did not get done. For people like that you NEED a trick like Scrum to get them to care at all; make them play a game and through that structure be forced to start thinking.
@@MiGujack3 toyota is kanban system. agile and scrum on the other hand, became popular because it allows consultants to charge many more hours for the same work with hour-long scrum meetings [cuz ppl never follow the rules]. ofc proponents of agile will retort 'that's not real agile, read the manifesto!' -- just like communists lol, there is a huge gap being the dream and reality. in software it's universally much better to design the product first, then build it. aka waterfall. agile in practice is a recipe of endless feature creep [aka more billable hours]. src -- 25 yrs as a software developer, from startups to fortune 500s.
I worked at Nummi as an IBEW 595 apprentice. I liked working there as it was interesting to see the vehicles coming together. And I also grew up down the street . As an apprentice I worked all over Nummi ,under ground and even on the roof of Nummi . Great memories and my EX wife father worked for Nummi (Bob McConnell) .
very odd that a criticism of the performance of the Japanese Navy during WW-2 was a rigid top-down decision making style while the US Navy had diffused some decision making into the ranks. This lower-level empowerment resulted in a more capable combat force and contributed to the US success in naval combat. Perhaps the Japanese did learn from their loss.
I understand why you would believe this but it doesn't have any correlation with effective management styles. Of course, you're correct that the style is superior however, that is not why the Japanese Empire failed it's objectives. The Americans had intelligence intercepts, access to better technology (although at the beginning of the war the Zero was superior we upgraded to more competitive aircraft) and the ability to out-manufacture. It didn't help that empire's Army and Navy were in competition with each other and failed to work together.
No, as another commenter as noted they learnt from W. Edwards Deming. While he was ignored initially by the US, Toyota listened. I’m not sure Japan learned much from WW2, they try to ignore all of it, besides they they had nuclear bombs dropped on two cities and play the victim over that.
I've had 2 NUMMI cars - and I still have one. A 2000 Corolla and a 2000 (Chevy) Prizm - the same car as the Corolla just with the bowtie on it and you can often get them cheaper because no one knows what they really are. My Grandmother had a 1996 Corolla that was built in the Cambridge, Ontario Toyota plant and it was always nicer and more well built than either of my cars from Fremont even though it was a base model with the 4A-FE and the 3 speed auto. Slow as all hell though. The 1ZZ-FE may be an oil burner but it does actually move the car when you ask it to.
GM Fremont aka "Freaky Fremont" was rife with labor issues and was the worst in the GM system. The running joke was that, "If it's available, you could get it at Fremont". That included gambling, drugs, sex, alcohol and more. The "Terrible Three" plants in the GM system were all located in California: Van Nuys (closed in 1992), Fremont (closed in 1982) and Southgate (closed in 1982) were all terrible plants. A worker at Fremont was once called into the foreman's office after they figured out that he had left 300-400 front ends loose on purpose. When questioned, he related that he was getting back at the foreman for writing him up for drinking on the job. GM should have kept NUMMI going and partnered with Toyota on a continuous basis. Both companies benefitted from the arrangement and the NUMMI plant is a case study for MBA and graduate programs---I know I studied it during the time I did my MBA in the late 1990s.
The average annual household income in Fremont CA is $183,248. Median sales price for a house is $1,356,087. That is not the kind of place you would ever build a large assembly plant today where low land costs and cheap labor along with tax breaks from local governments is the way to go to lower production costs.
4:43 Small correction: The gent in that picture is Akio Toyoda, son of Tatsuro Toyoda and he was Toyota’s CEO from 2009 to mid 2023. He has beenreplaced by Koji Sato, former Lexus and Gazoo Racing president.
Small correction for you: Akio Toyoda is the son of Shoichiro Toyoda. Shoichiro and Tatsuro are brothers. Their father was Kiichiro, who was the founder of Toyoda Motors in 1933. In 1933 Toyoda Motors was a division of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works which had been founded in 1926 by his father, Sakichi Toyoda. Like their cars, Toyoda family members have been long lived except for Kiichiro who died at 57 from a cerebral hemorrhage (stroke) caused by a chronic disease. After Kiichiro's death in 1952, his cousin Eiji, an engineer by training, took over running the company until 1994. Eiji lived to 100, Shoichiro to 97, Tatsuro to 88.
A GM employee who was in upper management in Michigan told me Toyota learned how to do quality paint systems in a palate of colors from the NUMMI Fremont plant. That is Technology transfer.
The foundations were built upon Demming's pioneering ideas in statistical process control, but by the time it went from Japan back to America in the form of TPS, it was(and is) very distinctly Japanese both in terms of culture and terminology. A lot of the terminology don't have clean English translations and requires some exposition to fully explain.
How much of Japanese-ness is the ability to "culturally appropriate" the good while leaving behind the bad, whether that's society-wide sociocultural stuff or corporate culture stuff, and the ability for management to actually recognize valuable innovations such as Deming's work and adopt them, instead of fighting it until they finally die and are replaced by their less ossified prior subordinates who recognized it the whole time but couldn't implement it
Japan has always been able to take ideas 'produced' abroad and make it their own. The process, including but not limited to JIT, Kaizen, and Kanban, are all Japanese in origin. The basis being on Deming's while important is moot because the western countries decided to ignore an academic who had basically taken the statistical analysis field in a new direction which the Japanese manufacturing industry took to practice.
@@choilive Also worth mentioning, the failure of most Western non-Japanese firms to do the full JIT instead of a lazier, simplified version that didn't fully or even hardly at all take into account supply chain variables is how they/we suffered as badly as we did during and after COVID-19. Many, though far from all, are adapting and improving there somewhat. Tldr the difference was, the extreme of what I'm talking about, firms decided JIT not only meant just-in-time (for delivery / demand of the final product) manufacture; it came to also mean placing orders from suppliers of components and whatever other "ingredients" are required to manufacture that product, at the last possible time to try to maintain no inventory of those as well. This of course means that a hiccup there, means a failure to actually achieve JIT manufacture of your product.
Actually, JIT is not designed to handle supply chain shocks like what happened in COVID. JIT requires a statistically predictable flow of parts in the right place at the right time. This is required to eliminate the need for large inventory buffers that would normally be able to handle supply chain shocks. This has been a well known compromise of the system and it works well most of the time. It just so happens that black swan events like a pandemic REALLY throws a wrench in the whole operation. For example: You expect Part A to arrive in 1 month from the supplier at the 3 sigma confidence level, but Part A actually ends up taking 6 months to arrive. You have very little inventory of Part A because you follow JIT, and Part A is required for you complete your Widget. Your entire production line is now stuck. Amplify this problem by the hundreds or thousands of parts in your BOM... you can see how it implodes very quickly.
It's always been selfish and confrontational because that's how the corporate-political alliance treated workers back then, and often still does today.
@@doujinflip Still doesn't change the fact that a union who doesn't try to strike a fair balance (like here where different factions within the union where having competitions on who could annoy management the most) between worker rights and worker responsibility will eventually self sabotage.
Damn this was interesting ass all crap! I hope very much your channel does very well! Not only was this so informative it pieced together certain aspects of information so throughly that… I am remembering those in my life who gave me a tidbit here or a tidbit there. Might sound super vague but this brought back childhood memories of people important in my life who have now passed. Liked and subscribed forsure!
I am still driving a NUMMI built car, Pontiac Vibe aka Toyota Matrix. It definitely has the Toyota quality written all over it. Sad the plant closed for a period. It hit the Fremont economy pretty hard during that time until Tesla went in there.
I love the Pontiac Vibe so much that I have two of them. However, I don't seem to remember that being mentioned in the narration. Such an versatile car.
My mom has an 09' Matrix S awd (Built in Canada) it's pretty fun to drive, and carry alot of stuff. The body kit, rear spoiler and 18" wheels make it look pretty good too.
I'm glad you pointed out the issues with the UAW. While 80s GM cars were hardly desirable, the UAW was and still is one of the biggest cancers on the American car industry. While the initial purpose of a union is noble, the UAW is a perfect example of why you don't want unions to get _too_ powerful. As someone that's spent 2.5 decades in a union myself the union cares about itself first, lobbying for democrats second, and it's members a distant third. Actually making a quality product for your employer isn't even on the list. Every time they fight for raises my union itself wants a bigger and bigger cut. There was even a year where they negotiated a .50 raise from owners but the union wanted more so they took $1 from the worker effectively giving us a .50 pay _CUT_ while my boss was paying more. Then their pension is a Ponzi scheme that only rewarded the good old boys that set it up and now it's only 50% funded towards what they've promised and decreases every year. I'll be lucky if it still exists by the time I retire. This is precisely why many Toyota and Honda plants in the US are NOT UAW plants, while Ford, GM, and Chrysler keep pouring money into that pit of corruption. It's honestly surprising they can even compete with foreign brands when their labor costs are psychotically higher.
Allow me to offer a minor correction, being from Australia - Toyota started manufacturing here in 1958. I’ve since learnt Toyota’s first manufacturing plant outside of Japan was in Brazil.
That just in time parts system was pretty much adopted by every company and worked well until recently. The industry hit the black swan know as the pandemic. Cars sat in lots, unable to be sold due to parts shortages. This caused car prices to explode, and for a while, you could actually sell your used car for more than you purchased it for.
Notice that Toyota had no supply shortages because they had properly buffered critical parts. Only poorly managed companies like Ford had supply problems.
@@haveaseatplease Companies anticipated low demand and canceled orders. When demand came back they struggled to get their parts because everyone now wanted their orders and chip fabs had already allocated the production to other customers. There was also pandemic related factory and port shutdowns but if everyone had kept a buffer of parts, things wouldn't have been as bad overall. I'd be interested in your take to expand my understanding.
Part of this is American companies implementing JIT on everything, even things that Toyota does not. Even Toyota over time has changed how much they store some things. It's all about lead time and complexity of the production chain. Stamped metal pieces, rubber seals, and windows do not take long to ramp up and down productivity. Electronic chips have lead times that can extend many months from order to final product, and to increase productivity takes years and tons of money with very expensive machinery that takes a year to make. Toyota did not have nearly the same issues many American automakers had. But there were shortages of tons of different things affecting every industry. Even simple stuff eventually caught up to gt Toyota some. Tesla didn't do the same thing many American automakers did with reducing orders. And since a lot of components are made in house by them, they just needed raw material availability which was better off than more complete components. The chip shortage did eventually affect them, but since they use those chips on their own components with their own firmware and software, they were able to switch to other electronics not directly compatible. Stuff like PLCs, microcontrollers, and other chip related shortage things, they were able to make compatible firmware to work in their cars and get around supply issues much better than others.
True. Not having any union in a company is quite concerning though (except when it's a cooperative where every workers is a patron). Sounds like union busting is in progress.
Large companies do their upmost best to compromise the union by bribing or corrupting union leaders. Go and read on the way GM corrupted and bought the important union leaders at each plant.
The US and Australia had car industries due to Protectionist policy and Corporate Welfare...Japan has one based on MERIT. My Japanese van is 33 years old, has 390000kms up, and is the most excellent vehicle I have ever owned.
I owned a NUMMI-built car, a 2004 Pontiac Vibe GT, from new until 2021. The day I drove it off the dealership lot was its last day at the dealer. It ran flawlessly, never requiring any warranty work or any repairs other than wear items and general maintenance, for almost 200,000 miles. Had GM still had an option for a NUMMI vehicle, I would have strongly considered it rather than the Toyota product I replaced it with.
Toyota's frequently mentioned as the original source when "kanban" systems are being taught in software and games development. Essentially cards/post-its in columns, each representing units of work, and gradually making their way from "backlog" to "done"
Once owned a car made at NUUMI. Excellent car, served me well years and sold it to a friend who put way more miles on it than I ever had. GM had a winner with the Corolla Prizm, so of course GM did the smart thing and introduced the same-sized subcompact Cadavalier, I mean, Cavalier into the same market segment and drop the far far better Prizm. Idiocy. Typical GM.
Add up how many bailouts American car companies have had to beg the taxpayer for, and it's in the billions. Much of that money never paid back, but boy! Did the CEOs and top management make millions of $ in the meantime and all retired with lavish pensions, health care plans, country club memberships for life and more.
I have a NUMMI car -- a 1988 Chevy Nova "Twin Cam." It's a peppy little beast and fun to drive because it's a stick shift. It's not my daily driver but i like it. They only made 3,400 of them, so it has some collector value too.
I toured the NUMI plant before it closed, and I toured it again after Tesla started making cars there. I also went back their to pick up my wife's Tesla later.
@@alejandrobolanos4655It means that, technically, but it isn't really a regular phrase. The original Nova sold just fine in Spanish language countries. It's really sad seeing this dumb old myth STILL being repeated decades later.
I drive older japanese cars for a lot of reasons. New cars have gotten impossibly complex to repair creating an imo throw away culture around cars. I pay mechanic bills due to age, but you need to know how to turn a wrench, not turn a wrench+be a computer whiz. Current daily is a trusty old 1994 mr2 gt-s, if it does break down its makes sense as to why. The old toyotas are very well built/engineered, even though the car looks fancy in person its arguably a cost saver
You don't have to be a computer whiz to work on modern cars...All you need to know is what the different data streams are and how to interpret them. Computers aid is diagnostics by pointing you in a general direction of a problem. Sounds like you're just a tad lazy to take a few minutes to pick up a $20 scanner and do a little bit of research. I've been working on my own cars for the last 10 years and the car's computer has helped myself numerous times. If you think modern cars are so bad, why is there so many Toyota models with 300k+ miles that were made in the past 15 years? You definitely don't see that with GM, Ford, or Jeep/Dodge. Nothing is impossible if you actually do some research and put in some effort.
Just on a FYI basis: the movie "Gung Ho" starring Michael Keaton was set in the background of "Japanese car maker in the US". Still living in the UK at the time I recall the time when British Leyland, whose work ethics was probably marginally better than GM Fremont and the products marginally worse, got into a joint venture with Honda, which helped it a fair bit. Nissan started a brand new factory in Sunderland, and it is still going despite a scare a couple of years ago.
BL's work ethic was def not better than GM's . They went on strike way more often , & for way pettier reasons such as a bathroom was missing toilet paper or there was no tea in a break room
Up until 1986 I was a GM loyalist so I bought a Chevy Nova. Boy did that car teach me how reliable and durable Toyota mechanical components were. So ironically, GM taught me, via their Nova, that Toyotas were superior. I have been a Toyota loyalist ever since.
I own a 1999 Toyota Tacoma Limited extra cab 4x4 3.4 v6 that was built at that plant. I bought it 5 years ago and it has been one of the better pickups I have owned. It has not stranded me yet
I had a company car Pontiac vibe built there. It was the best company car I ever had in my 40 years with that employer (they only get cars from the "big 3")
I don't think the model name "Nova" was a hindrance to selling in an English speaking country like the US. GM had other cars with the Nova name prior that sold well.
Only by sending the workers to Japan to train would they see with their own eyes how the system works and that it indeed did work. Lee Iacocca couldn't convince Chrysler workers of the quality that could be achieved, so stubborn were they that out of frustration he drove a Toyota onto the production floor to convince them.
When I asked a motoring journalist why there is still a quality isse with US cars he said it probably comes down to the workers, so are they listening today or has nothing changed?@@davef.2329
This video is very interesting on the question of technological transfer. The Japanese have been practicing this since the days of the black fleet! It might not have been Deming it might have been Perry (LoL). The Japanese sent students out to learn and invited experts to to teach and pass their knowhow. They cherry picked the best technologies - warships the UK, for the Army - the French, for artillery Germany. ...etc. Once they had learned from them the foreign experts were paid off and sent home. By the early 1900s Japan had defeated a major European power on land and at sea and had their own colonies. This is not to say that they made no mistakes or were wrongheaded. Many of the things we know from Japan had their roots in Japanese attitudes towards customers and quality in the Meji era industrialisation and I wonder whether Deming's work fell on fertile ground rather than been revolutionary. An interesting question would be why innovation and technical transfer were not taken up. In my personal case its the years of bombarded with innovation and mindless blather by tech gurus and Directors of possibilities who are unable to produce anything of real use. I imaging the autoworks saw the utility of the Toyota system - that it made sense to them.
“Just in time” presumes uninterrupted supplier deliveries. It didn’t function so well during the pandemic, and probably won’t during other global disruptions.
I wonder whether Toyota has become the new GM. Here in Australia, the Chinese offer fairly comparable cars for about 2/3rds of the price of a Toyota now. That's a hell of a lot, and it makes you think - even if you'd normally never consider a native Chinese brand. $10-20K AUD less for a small to mid-size car is just hard to ignore. Toyota is also struggling to provide hybrids, with waiting times of up to 18 months for something like an RAV4. You could argue that this is because of their popularity - or, conversely, you could argue that their manufacturing planning wasn't up to the job. In any case, the Chinese will benefit from this because THEY can provide hybrids with short waiting times or even straight away. And the number of deliveries is scaling up fast - e.g. MG is now the 6th biggest brand here - in front of Kia. GWM will overtake Subura within the next few months. It'll be interesting to see what the automotive landscape will look like in 10y.
You get what you pay for, and Chinese brands aren't known for their reliability and durability even in China. So it depends how disposable you think a car should be.
@@doujinflip The same was said about the Japanese back in the day. The "trash" period is pretty much over if you can believe the usual review sites here in Oz. Feel free to google reviews of the Tank 300 or BYD Seal. I, for one, don't intend to buy a Chinese car, but numerous others do.
I believe the concept that separates Japanese, at least Toyota, is Kaizen. It’s a belief and a practice. American automakers haven’t quite figured that out.
The Toyota quality program was a study for all US businesses Harley Davidson, GM, so many companies learned from Toyotas quality programs and processes we did also in our business great model to study and leverage
Your first photo of Tatsuro Toyoda was not correct - you showed a photo of Akio Toyoda instead of Tatsuro. Your second photo of Tatsuro in the Chevy Nova was correct. Overall the presentation was excellent.
I worked for a big semiconductor company that got into making calculators in the early seventies. At one time we had a technology exchange meeting with GM. GM was shocked that we simply scrapped an entire unit if it was beyond repair rather than spending valuable man hours to fix it. One of the GM engineers said, "We never scrap anything!" Maybe they should have scrapped some of those parts before they put in my Pontiac 6000.
Texas Instruments 😏
In Canada GM received 6 billion to save manufacturing at a politically important plant (in toronto), during the global financial crisis. GM took that money to pay for labour and when it ran out, they literally closed their operations and made the Canadian government look like retards.
Meanwhile the Japanese moved into Ontario, without subsidies, sourced all of the steel locally, hired local engineers and placed their factories next to some of Canada's best universities. Short story, Honda and Toyota saved Canadian automotive industry, employed Canadians, made great cars, and have amazing relations with the workers without having parasitic unions.
Sadly, a lot of north American manufacturing management and unions were absolutely terrible and thats why soo much manufacturing left
My first car was a Pontiac. I hated that car.
lot of the car oligarchs of the time just didnt understand quality control was paramount.
@@good-tn9srNominal Semidestructor?
On of the things Toyota does best, is it allows it’s assembly personnel to make suggestions on improvements, trials and then implements them if they work
Marketing anti-electric car lies. The other thing Toyota does well. Top 3 climate denier with only oil companies ahead of it.
@@smartelectriccarI'm pro-climate change. Deniers aren't helping sure. But stop taxing oil, protesting pipelines, and start approving fracking permits. The only reason I want an electric is because it's cheap. If we had cheap gasoline we wouldn't need to buy electric cars.
@@theduplicator3270 Fracking does the most damage to the environment permanently and releases more methane than any other human practice
Something Tesla also does incredibly well.
@@smartelectriccarAnti electric? They were the first ones to even bring hybrid and hydrogen to the masses. It’s not that they are anti electric, but they are not stupid like the econuts who thinks there’s enough power and a grid of being able to sustain going completely electric. Toyota has it right to offer a variety while trying to innovate to the next viable thing.
It's crazy how Toyota literally showed GM what to do and they still built trash afterwards.
😂
No offense, if you look at the American workers, too, they do all look like scummy C-grade students and high-school dropouts. The smug. Goes to show that under the right leadership and conditions, you can make a lot of dummies and vice-versa with a smart/diligent workforce put into a bad system/under bad management.
Crazy...yet jo bidin is your president...if only you Americans cared about silly stuff like that before debating Toyota and GM
@@march24-lp4pv crazy, dude, crazy
@@RawbLV Sure... everyone's crazy..
While the NUMMI plant closed in 2010, it was still shown as a VFR landmark on local Aviation charts as NUMMI as late as 2019.
Oh hey, it's Scott Manley! 💖
Odd crossover - but here we are
@@dmacpher Not that odd really imo :P
I just checked and now it's called NOTAM.
Just kidding! It is PLANT (VPTES). Also, hi, Scoat Manlay!
It’s now a factory where Tesla automobiles are being manufactured.
My father, a former long time GM district service manager, was working for Toyota when the NUMMI plant was new in operation. Everything reported in this video squares with what my father relates to me. He knew Toyota's quality was far superior to the big three of Detroit. It was undeniable, as the warranty claims demonstrated. NUMMI was a test of whether Japan could re-export Deming's quality expertise, originally implemented in Japan after World War II, back to the U.S. They could. And they did. The rest is history.
You mentioned Deming which is interesting because his name rarely comes up in conversation. I worked with associates of Phil Crosby and James Harrington for many years, and I've always been baffled by how little people know about TQM. The principles they taught me, such as Six Sigma, DIRFT and CAPA, have guided me in my career ever since... and I don't even work in manufacturing.
In 2016, when I was studying abroad in Japan, I went on a school trip to a Toyota plant in Aichi prefecture (in the city Toyota, renamed after the car manufacturer). After a whole presentation about the systems implemented, we got a tour through the assembly line. What struck me as most fascinating was how often the line would stop. Sometimes several times a minute you could hear the sound that indicated that someone had pressed the button and the line would stop shortly after. That meant that the line would only move for a few seconds before stopping again. It looked a bit like stop-and-go traffic. But the line would also never stop for long. Workers would only need a few moments to finish whatever work step they were on, and the line started again.
Quality work before quantity work
I work in a Tesla factory and the line doesn't stop unless something breaks or if some critical part isn't stocked
@@nick-zc9xv Didn't Tesla buy the NUMMI plant? Not sure if it's the one you work at. Elon ignores safety in his plants for aesthetics, so I'm not surprised that they don't stop the line.
トヨタの工場見学の他にも多く良い日本での経験をして頂いたのなら嬉しいです！
@@nick-zc9xv No wonder Tesla scores so horribly low on mechanical production quality and longevity of the cars. Various Tesla cars scored worst out of 300 new-ish car models in Sweden when it came to the state of the car once the initial 3-year warranty is over. =/
It was considered to be a career killer for a GM manager to be sent to NUMI. All the knowledge Toyota gave GM was ignored, much to Toyota's amazment.
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
Typical GM....they always know best... look at warranty claims. Government Motors
@@taylorsutherland6973yeah, most American auto manufacturers needed to be put out of business ages ago. They’ve crippled this country lobbying for huge segregating highways instead of quality rail, especially within cities.
Oh shut up and go live in a pod with your gay robot.@@DengueBurger
LOL... GM man... what a flippin joke, through and through. Folks wondered why the cars were turds, so were the people running it.
I worked at NUMMI one summer. They hired college students to work on the production line during summer vacation season. Had to join the Union. The training was very thorough. I worked in the body shop making T Posts (the frame part between the front and rear doors) and also rear wheel wells for Toyota Corollas and Geo Prizms. While there I did hear some stories of GM Fremont shenanigans including weed smoking and drinking. Good group of hard working people I got to work with there. They called me back to work the following summer but I couldn’t do it because I was taking a summer school class. I still wear a scar I got at NUMMI. I was holding onto a part that was getting a repair weld and a welding spark landed between my glove and protective arm cover.
Maybe you worked on my old Prizm. It was a fantastic little car, roomy inside, reliable, punchy 1.8l engine, and priced just right.
@@pac1fic055Almost 200k on my 94 Prizm, she's still going strong! Insanely reliable cars.
14:00 This is an often cited story. However, in Spanish, the word "nova" and the phrase "No va" have two different meanings, just like "notable" and "no table" in English. The original production run of the 1962-1979 Chevrolet Nova was a very popular compact rear-wheel drive car. That popularity didn't transfer over to the new front-wheel drive version based on the Toyota Corolla which was also built at NUMMI, so the car was rebranded as the Geo Prizm and later as the Chevrolet Prizm when General Motors discontinued the Geo make.
Thank you. The video producers clearly never fact-checked their assertions before committing it to video. Also note the Novas and Corollas built at NUMMI were the EXACT SAME VEHICLE with different badging. Ditto the later Geo Prism, then the Chevrolet Prism. This whole "Production" segment of the video was blatantly incorrect and casts doubt about the veracity of any of the other information in this video. Do better.
The "Nova means 'no go'" thing is a business school story that's completely false but sounds too good to die.
Yes, using this myth in the video raises credibility concerns.
Va means 'go' in french, so nova --> no go.
Although that is a combination of 2 languages and not een spanish so take it as you will.
So, GM was having problems with the plant because their workers felt that management didn't care about them or what they thought, and therefore decided to raise hell. Toyota comes in, and fixes that in an instant by just giving the workers what they wanted: more agency. Wow, it's almost like if you treat your workers like human beings they actually do good work, so weird.
And then look what happened after Tesla took over… build quality went back to sh**, and worker pay and morale is low again ( I know a few who have tried working there and gave up)
@@pushsliceTesla is innovating manufacturing again. They are years ahead of everyone else.
"treat your workers like human" and the Japanese just don't go together.
O rly🤨? Is that the whole story now? Our lexicon needs a new word. I nominate idiology. Either that or maybe shill works. Depends on whether you believe that over simplified one sided story of yours or your just hawking it for undisclosed reasons.
Go figure
They applied the DEMING METHOD, like all Japanese companies and even the public functions in Japan. American statistician Edwards Deming taught the Japanese how to build in Quality and Continually Improve the Process when he was part of General MacArthur's team that re-organized and re-constituted Japan post WWII. To this day the Japanese award an annual Deming Award to the company or department that has the best Process Improvement of the year. Prior to Deming "made in Japan" meant what "Made in China" means today. The Japanese were not happy with this state of affairs and gladly absorbed Deming's Methodology.
Meanwhile, American industry was NOT INTERESTED. The rest is history.
Deming only went to Toyota after he was rejected by the big 4 in the US.
It seems American, Chinese, and increasingly European manufacturers are not interested. It seems they only want revenue from garage support and new sales as soon as the original warranty expires, instead of building up a reputation of reliability.
Exactly! I came to the comments to make sure someone had said this.
This is why no one with a brain buys American cars..(total junk) the big 3 can't even build a reliable power train... they will all go bankrupt again, Toyota is already pivoting into our current economic reality, creating lower cost high quality products worldwide that will all last 200k miles,
@@doujinflip
My Chinese made appliances, gadgets and devices are reliable and durable. 👍
Thanks for bringing this little known story (outside of the Bay Area) to light. I worked 18 years across the i880 from NUMMI/Tesla factory and drove one of the last NUMMI Tacoma. Great car, never had any issues with it.
Yeah some terrorist also drive NUMMI built pickup trucks.
@@Embargoman you’re probably referring to the Hilux. Toyota hasn’t sold one in the USA since they introduced Tacoma in 1995.
Yeah probably some first generation sold in the Middle East by terrorist as they use pickup trucks made in California could be odd, but Freemount had made vehicles for terrorist.
Earlier this year, the production facility I work at in the UK (electronics) brought in Nagamatsu san, one of the guys who implemented the whole lean/just in time process at Toyota.
It was a Shingijutsu Kaizen and was good fun if a bit of a steep learning curve. An honour to work with Nagamatsu san.
Sir, a very good video, I know that this GM plant was bad, I just didn't know it was horrible. Japan has a very good reputation for quality, but that was not always the case. Before WWII Japan was frankly known for junk. After WWII a man by the name Dr. William Deming, a quality expert and a professor from M.I.T. went to the American auto companys and wanted to show them statistical analysis and how it would improve car quality. They were not interested, becauce they could sell every car that came off the line. So then Dr. Deming approached the Japanese auto companies and they happily embraced the man and his knowledge. There is even a statue of him there. Statistical analysis is what you profiled in your video, seeing a problem and fixing it on the spot and treating quality as an never ending job. You might want to do a video on Dr. Deming and how he transformed Japan manufacturing. Only after losing great amounts of market share becauce of the Japanese dlid the Big 3 auto companies here start to imbrace iS.A. in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Much Success.
"Did you know that they found coke bottles in American built cars?"
"Grandpa please you're just exaggerating."
Grandpa was right, but required a bit more context. Dang though yeah, the intro sounded like a nightmare to be in for everyone.
The first Honda in the USA was so bad that no one would buy it. It was cheap, so I went to see it at a dealer. The shift knob came off. The clutch would only shift into 1st gear and the brakes didn't work at all.
But it was cheap. It took them 10 years to get their schiesse together, and now they're the 2nd best auto in the world, right behind Toyota.
Whatever manufacturing share was lost GM still sold more cars annually in the United States than anyone else for 90 years, until Toyota finally bested them at managing covid supply chain issues recently. The first time in 90 years that GM wasn't the number one auto manufacturer by sales volume in the United States.
@@gooser__43 when it comes to foreign brand presence Toyota Honda Nissan and Hyundai / Kia are at every intersection here in volume. Not mostly Toyotas and some Hyundai's and Kia's. Regardless what we see at the intersections is irrelevant to the fact that GM was the dominant auto manufacturer by sales volume annually in the United States for 90 years, only just being bested by Toyota for the first time because Toyota better managed their supply chain issues that were brought about by the whole covid fiasco. It is what it is. For 90 years GM sold more cars in the United States annually than any other manufacturer, beginning in 1931.
"WASHINGTON, Jan 4 2022 (Reuters) - Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) outsold General Motors Co (GM.N) in the United States in 2021, marking the first time the Detroit automaker has not led U.S. auto sales since 1931.
Toyota sold 2.332 million vehicles in the United States in 2021, compared to 2.218 million for General Motors, the automakers said Tuesday.
GM's U.S. sales were down 13% for 2021, while Toyota was up 10%. For all of 2020, GM's U.S. sales totaled 2.55 million, compared with Toyota's 2.11 million and Ford's 2.04 million."
@@gooser__43 so my point stands regardless you're stoplight statistics.
At the same time, all of this was going on at GM I was working in a wood products factory on the west coast. The company brought in the same Toyota management system: Total Quality Management and Just in Time production. We got all the special training, tools, management support, etc. We did the pre-shift stretching exercises and the special quality control crew meetings. I learned skills and concepts that I still use these many years later. What happened? Our union was resistant and slow-walked at every turn. Ultimately, the plant was sold to a non-union company, and many people lost their jobs and had to re-apply for the new company. The union mentality killed the entire concept. How sad.
In my industry, unions are not unheard of, but extremely uncommon. Every union-run org I know of sounds terrible to work for based on stories I've heard. In this business it's very common for people to move around to other orgs, but union shops get avoided like plague, because you are guaranteed to have a bad time. My theory is that now that they're union shops, they can only get the worst of the worst to take a job working with them, thus making the union necessary and the toxic relationship between management and staff self-perpetuating. The proper solution is ejecting everyone and starting over, which occasionally happens, if they get absorbed in a merger with a larger non-union org.
I'm thankful that our Union and Company get along quite well all things considered.
I get that unions are protection and supposed to lift wages and whatnot. But overall I see a lot of unions just prevent companies from changing anything, changing layout and processes in a plant in an attempt to improve efficiency but stonewalled by the union. Crappy employees that do the minimum or nothing but keep their job. Pushing management away and creating antagonism.
Seems to me like a fair few protections could actually be accomplished with law, we have sick time requirements in many states, we could add PTO and other benefits, wage I think usually sorts itself but raising the floor (minimum wage) raises everyone's wage for the most part.
It's sad that while Unions have a noble cause, the second they gain any power it inevitably turns into massive corruption and no longer about the worker.
@@Jaker788 I think our institutions meant to protect to the worker are corrupt and weak. FLSA got watered down and the NLRB seems quite weak. There really is no alternative.
I think Unions probably should have a profit sharing with the company to encourage development and updating stuff.
Hey, I worked at this very factory for a short while in 2019! Tesla gave me 3 days of training and then set me loose, much different than what you described at Toyota.
I mean, it's Tesla. You build glorified toasters with bad (and expensive) batteries. Not much to assemble.
@@MiGujack3 More like glorified refrigerators. But then, I have a 40 year old "beer fridge" that's NEVER STOPPED WORKING. The batteries ... hmm, you have FACTS to back that up? No, didn't think so. Like PV panels or Intel processors, battery tech is improving at a tremendous pace. It's just you whiners don't mind if your phone is faster and better, but don't touch your noisy, smelly, expensive pickup!
@@capnkirk5528 You do know that when the EV battery loses it's efficiency to 80% charge it has to be replaced, for $4,000-$12,000? That's why smart people sell their 3-5 year old EVs to stupid people.
@@mutteringmale LMFAO. Are you a PAID troll, or do you work for free?
@@MiGujack3 Tesla still needs to improve the quality of their cars.
Another (apocryphal?) sub-story: after the plant was running, GM sent a team of production specialists to ovserve operations, and bring lessons back to GM management, supposedly for disemmination. They became admirers of the system and culture.
When they brought the lessons back to GM, they were not well accepted. Rather than stay with GM and watch inferior ideas be propagated, most of the analysis team quit to work for Toyota.
It's sad comedy how much better Toyota is at building cars than Detroit is.
well, Western management is the culprit. In some industries, owners treated workers so poorly for several generations that unions massively grew in power.
@@PainterVierax I think the term you are looking for is "American management". I live in a small Euro country with strong unions, and stuff like workers having influence over production and managers using the same cafeteria are obvious, not something exotic.
@@ThePhiphler well, socialism and unions started in Europe cities during the industrial revolution (the novel Germinal occurred in France). American management (which btw is more and more prevalent across Europe) aggravated the tensions, industry unions and union shop are more common in NA as well. But the issue is just the result of liberal capitalism where workers are considered as a disposable resource to exploit, not far from slavery. Many legislation across EU changed in consequence, forcing companies to get back to caring about employees, whereas NA stayed more liberal therefore more conflictual between holders and the workforce.
@@PainterVierax I believe that studies show that a flat management structure actually makes your business more competetive and earns more money. It's a question about what the managers expect, if they are to behave like barons or not.
And only thing GM (Garbage Motor) can do is brainwash people with Real People BS. Looks at how horrible Cadillac Escalade is compared to a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen and even Lexus LX and Toyota Land Cruiser are more exciting than a piece of shit Cadillac.
I highly recommend you guys to watch the Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho (1986). It's basically what this video is all about. It's a comedy about the cultural change/clash in an US-Autoplant which was taken over by a Japanese car manufacturer.
I haven't watched it in years, tha ks for reminding me of it.
Congratulations! 1,000 cars! :D lol
How about _Blue Collar (1978)_ ? There is no Japanese element but provides a very raw insight into the bureaucracy and dysfunction in a Detroit auto plant.
Reminds me of the movie 1986 Gung Ho where a Japanese executive is "exiled" to the USA as punishment and has to bring an American auto production plant up to Japanese efficiency standards. Great movie.
I worked a the tesla plant and learned the lore and history. Thanks for the review. This plant has a wild history and also has some pretty neat legacy infrastructure - like the abandoned paint ovens on the roof.
I interned at Tesla as a quality engineer at the Fremont plant and met an engineer who used to work at NUUMI. They flew him out to Japan to get trained and learn the Japanese ways. Crazy to see a guy like him coming back to the factory he once worked at before.
Thanks for the history. I've driven past that plant along the freeway in Fremont so many times and it's cool to know what was going on there.
And now they make crappy Teslas. Still Uhion, still making crap. The Testa is only average in reliability and people don't keep these silly EV's long, especially since there are no huge rebates anymore.
Think of it! A Tesla has hardly any critical engine parts, no radiator, no starter, no engine, no transmission, no cooling system and yet, they are "average".
@@mutteringmaleUhhhh...
Tesla is def not a Union Shop, m'dude
@@mutteringmaleThe last time the plant workers even TALKED about unionizing under the current company running the plant, they all got fired. 😂
I remember being told about this plant and its history a few years ago. My girlfriend’s uncle is a long time service manager at a northern VA Chevy dealership and I had a conversation with him about American car quality vs Japan. Toyota in particular. He told me basically everything that you outlined here and I took that knowledge with me to my part time job at CARMAX. They used to call me Mr Toyota because I only sold used Toyota products. If they couldn’t afford it I would sell them a Honda or Mazda. I just didn’t want my customers to be weighed down by a car that will constantly break and eat their wallet. I think out of the 4 years I was at CARMAX I only sold two American cars.
When I bought, refurbished and resold used cars I learned right away to only sell Toyotas and Hondas.
@@joanfrederick9176Ford almost had me, and they're like the Republicans who strive desperately to lose every election by waiting till the last minute and announcing they're on a platform of abortion.
So, I researched and wanted to buy a Ford Maverick hybrid. Good price, good reliability and yet, every dealer wanted to reape me and lied to me and made it so hard to buy I instead just said "no". They almost had me, and they screwed it up.
Toyota understands people..and it shows
2:43
The American workers got absolutely ROASTED
That's the truth
And it is the absolute truth that still holds today. Per the recent UAW demands of a 32 hr work week but paid for 40 .
@@bobroberts2371 did you watch the part regarding how much less training they got here?
@@TheAleksander22
From what I understand, the GM jobs were broken down so small that not much training was needed to do the job with any proficiency.
Did you watch the part about 20 % absenteeism , 7,000 grievances , random unauthorized strikes and generally labor trying to sabotage the company?
How about this, in one GM stamping plant ( not Freemont ) it took a shift plus to change a large stamping die. Faced with a possible plant closure, a few physical changes were made along with " don't be a union worker sleeping on the job " . Die change out was reduced to 45 MINUTES !!!!! I got this information DIRECTLY from the guy that redesigned the process and implemented the changes.
@@TheAleksander22 Also, having worked for a major consumer goods Japanese company, much of Japanese company culture / training has nothing to do with the specific job the person will be doing. It has to do with things like problem solving , getting along with others. In other words ,respecting others and not being a di. . . .k .
I like the rebranding of the Waterfall process as Poo Poo Ball Rolling Down Poo Poo Mountain.
And how GM learned nothing.
The thought of being better than anybody else (so called exceptionalism) leads to the downfall of a person or a company.
According to this video, they learned a lot, but when they tried to put it into practice, union got in the way.
@@mintheman7Unions & management
@@mintheman7 I’ve driven modern GM vehicles… it can’t all be blamed on the unions, though they do share the blame.
Gm is just constantly shitty they can't help it 😂, they even tried to kill the bolt last year 🤣
My outstanding Toyota Tacoma was built by NUMMI and it has been the most reliable vehicle I have ever owned (still going strong after 22 years and 220,000 miles). You think GM would have learned something from Toyota regarding quality, but sadly that has not been the case.
Years ago I worked at Hewlett-Packard in Britain (before the company lost its way after the retirement of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard). There was a lot in common with the NUMMI approach: Single cafeteria and parking lot for all employees, from site manager to toilet cleaner. Small teams working to get consensus on how to do things. The realisation that it is better to stop production than to continue manufacturing products with defects.
One thing not mentioned, during the time they were making Novas and Corollas on the same assembly line, Corollas were out selling Novas three to one. They were exactly the same car except for badging. That’s why GM bailed. It was at that time Toyota started to build the pickups which were very profitable for them. I worked at one the feeder shops making seat frames for Johnson Controls, and frame brackets for Dana. When demand increased for the trucks, they moved assembly to Texas where they could get cheaper labor, and take advantage of the even cheaper labor of Mexico. This move not only effected the thousands of workers at NUMMI, but also 3 times more of local suppliers. The cost of doing business in California not only affected GM, Ford and Chrysler had the same problems. It’s only a matter of time before Tesla will do the same.
My 2009 nummi made pontiac vibe is still doing well in the familly, i bought it new, sold it to my girlfriend who sold it back to my brother who still drive it...used it this summer and boy, that car still got a lot of life in it! I paid around 20k for it in april 2008...impressing! That car sure sold a lot of future toyota for my familly!
Vibe=RAV. Best kept secret in the industry. Like the Dodge D50 pickup truck, which was really made by Mitsubishi. I would never buy an small American truck unless it was a re-badged Japanese car.
Vibe is more like the Matrix, not rav. Back in early 2009 during depth of the GFC, Pontiac was one of the brands being shuttered and you could have had a Pontiac Vibe for less than $10k…. Good old days before feds started QE and all the associated inflation.
I live in the Bay Area and my first car was a Nummi Toyota Carolla! If I'm not mistaken, the plant also made the car under the badge Geo Prism.
The Geo Prism was a JDM Corolla model adapted for the North American market. Why they didn't use the exact same model as the Corolla already built for North America and just swap badges I don't know. Most of the major parts were the same though, but there were differences deeper than the badges, and also some part bleed into North American built Corollas.
One major downside was that a NUMMI or Canadian Corolla with the 1.8L engine got a Delco alternator instead of the Denso alternator Toyota used in other markets with the 1.8. Ask me how I went through 3 of those piece-of-shit Delco alternators in my Canadian build 90s Corolla... Fast forward a decade and my newer mid-2000s Corolla built at NUMMI had a Delphi computer in it, which had to be replaced under recall, because GM used substandard solder on them.
4:42 The picture is Akio Toyoda.
Late 1940s, W. Edwards Deming is the man who taught Japan quality. After World War II, Deming visited Japan and at the request of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) gave a series of lectures on quality control to Japanese engineers and to top management on management's tasks and responsibilities.
NUMMI made the Corsica I got up to 252,000 miles. Extremely impressive for an American small car built in 1992. I always thought it was a Camry with cheap GM parts glued on.
NUMMI had absolutely nothing to do with the Corsica - do you mean Corolla? Wiki says the Corsicas were built at Wilmington Assembly in Delaware and Linden Assembly in New Jersey. They were pure GM dreck - Under-Engineered, badly built American rubbish 🤮
NUMMI didn't build your Corsica. If you got it up to 252K I guess those GM parts weren't cheap.
NUMMI did not build your Corsica. I had a 1993 for my first car. Had 110k miles with lots of problems. Overheating, random engine stalls coming to a stop, electrical issues, etc. I can't imagine the amount of money you spent to maintain that pos.
@@Gobinator98 No kidding? Plastic bits kept breaking off it all the time. I spent practically nothing on maintenance. Just drove it into the ground. Was so impressed I bought one Cavalier after another, both with the throaty 2.2L engine, both died around 150k. Afterward I went Japanese and never looked back.
I bought a new 1995 Corsica, it needed a new engine at 20k miles, and the transmission went out at 45k miles, needless to say I've driven nothing but Toyota ever since.
I was given a private tour of this plant in the early 90s by the plant manager as my uncle was friends with him. It was run by Toyota then of course. Incredible to see and extremely well run
Very interesting video! I had an 07 Corolla assembled at Nummi Fremont that was very well made, 200k miles of trouble free driving. It was still running great when I traded it in for a newer model.
It would be interesting to make a sequel on what happened after Tesla took over.
Everything went to shit again!
Very cool story
I obtained a masters from the University of Washington. Most of what I remember is from the Toyota Management System. It made it fun to learn as I have always been obsessed with the Japanese and their culture.
stop being weird gaijin
@@kingjoe3rdNah he's right, its a fascinating and unique country/people/culture. We're all aware of the exaggerated problems as its everywhere on UA-cam since its trendy now to be anti-weeb or whatever it is. Got stationed in Japan for some years and thought it was a cool country with awesome people. Some of us don't care about anime but can respect the culture of attention-to-detail and pride in craftsmanship so many nations lack
Ok Mr. Robato.
Agile and scrum management methods are super common in tech today, all thanks to Toyota's production system.
I never really understood scrum, the college I went to really tried to push it onto us (or simulate it) and it failed horribly.
A real company that offers internships did a big presentation about scrum to show it to us and it was awful, it sounded like corporate speak to me.
@@MiGujack3
Got to keep in mind they're systems designed to whip unionised boomers into something resembling an effective workforce.
If you're born with half a brain and use it, you outperform those by default and the system won't work on you since you don't exhibit the problems it's meant to fix.
Scrum appoints 'owners' out of a group of boomers who by default won't care at all and uses them as directors to find faults within work for example. You NEED that if people are passive.
To give you an example I was hired for 4 months into a Dutch municipality, a city. Each year they lost money and their thinking proces ended with 'report the losses', finance didn't redirect their problem to the workfloor and those didn't care.
This built up until they lost 6% of all (taxpayer!!) money put into that department, which was their own property portfolio, their real estate, their facilities.
So I was hired externally and set about diagnosing the problem.
What I found was lazyness, passivity, corruption and stupidity. THE major thing was they never redistributed utilities to the utilities company, to give you an idea those were privatised in 1994, I was hired in 2016. All those years they had paid taxes (mainly to the waterboard and province) on those objects.
Some objects were outright filed incorrectly, like an boomer idiot registering a sluice gate as a building and then getting it taxed, or adding "I dunno, lol, I'm a union member, I don't care" when asked if a sports pitch had drainage, prompting the waterboard to tax it as drained.
I filed on average 650 tax protests a week every week and the waterboard soon had two fulltime employees working just me protests. In all that time I lost a single case, won all the others. On average I reduced the annual financial burden by € 22800 a week.
For this efficiency I was ridiculed by boomer unionised workforce, with one saying quote "Why are you upset at losing your first case? You get paid regardless of the outcome." The concept of being the owner of your work was alien to that person, while I took the unjust ruling as almost an insult and pushed out an extra 200 cases that week.
When a shitty job landed within my team, it was given to the only junior in the room. I stepped up to shield him from it even though it wasn't stricly my job, but I could use a change. Then I was overstepped by a 61 year old unionised boomer who said, quote "Oh just give that to me. I won't do it and I'm 61 so they can't fire me.", the work did not get done.
For people like that you NEED a trick like Scrum to get them to care at all; make them play a game and through that structure be forced to start thinking.
@@EricLopushansky Yup, not having the teams decide what will be done in a sprint, because obviously management knows perfectly what can be done.
@@MiGujack3 toyota is kanban system. agile and scrum on the other hand, became popular because it allows consultants to charge many more hours for the same work with hour-long scrum meetings [cuz ppl never follow the rules]. ofc proponents of agile will retort 'that's not real agile, read the manifesto!' -- just like communists lol, there is a huge gap being the dream and reality. in software it's universally much better to design the product first, then build it. aka waterfall. agile in practice is a recipe of endless feature creep [aka more billable hours]. src -- 25 yrs as a software developer, from startups to fortune 500s.
This is one of the most fascinating videos on industry I've ever watched. Thanks for the great work.
I worked at Nummi as an IBEW 595 apprentice. I liked working there as it was interesting to see the vehicles coming together. And I also grew up down the street .
As an apprentice I worked all over Nummi ,under ground and even on the roof of Nummi .
Great memories and my EX wife father worked for Nummi (Bob McConnell) .
very odd that a criticism of the performance of the Japanese Navy during WW-2 was a rigid top-down decision making style while the US Navy had diffused some decision making into the ranks. This lower-level empowerment resulted in a more capable combat force and contributed to the US success in naval combat. Perhaps the Japanese did learn from their loss.
I understand why you would believe this but it doesn't have any correlation with effective management styles. Of course, you're correct that the style is superior however, that is not why the Japanese Empire failed it's objectives. The Americans had intelligence intercepts, access to better technology (although at the beginning of the war the Zero was superior we upgraded to more competitive aircraft) and the ability to out-manufacture. It didn't help that empire's Army and Navy were in competition with each other and failed to work together.
@@ryanreedgibson notice I wrote contributed.
No, as another commenter as noted they learnt from W. Edwards Deming. While he was ignored initially by the US, Toyota listened. I’m not sure Japan learned much from WW2, they try to ignore all of it, besides they they had nuclear bombs dropped on two cities and play the victim over that.
@@av_oidthe only ones crying victim these days are UAW and GM, etc. 😂
@@f430ferrari5 Historically GM has a lot of inertia built into their company culture.
I've had 2 NUMMI cars - and I still have one. A 2000 Corolla and a 2000 (Chevy) Prizm - the same car as the Corolla just with the bowtie on it and you can often get them cheaper because no one knows what they really are.
My Grandmother had a 1996 Corolla that was built in the Cambridge, Ontario Toyota plant and it was always nicer and more well built than either of my cars from Fremont even though it was a base model with the 4A-FE and the 3 speed auto. Slow as all hell though. The 1ZZ-FE may be an oil burner but it does actually move the car when you ask it to.
IIRC in 1998 the Prizm was about $2k less than a comparable Corolla, *and* you could use your GM credit card points to cover a lot of the cost!
Same for the Pontiac Vibe, A Toyota Matrix built side by side at NUMMI.
No mention of the classic 1986 movie Gung Ho inspired by the Nummi plant?
Clone of the movie Take This Job And Shove It.
GM Fremont aka "Freaky Fremont" was rife with labor issues and was the worst in the GM system. The running joke was that, "If it's available, you could get it at Fremont". That included gambling, drugs, sex, alcohol and more. The "Terrible Three" plants in the GM system were all located in California: Van Nuys (closed in 1992), Fremont (closed in 1982) and Southgate (closed in 1982) were all terrible plants. A worker at Fremont was once called into the foreman's office after they figured out that he had left 300-400 front ends loose on purpose. When questioned, he related that he was getting back at the foreman for writing him up for drinking on the job.
GM should have kept NUMMI going and partnered with Toyota on a continuous basis. Both companies benefitted from the arrangement and the NUMMI plant is a case study for MBA and graduate programs---I know I studied it during the time I did my MBA in the late 1990s.
The average annual household income in Fremont CA is $183,248. Median sales price for a house is $1,356,087. That is not the kind of place you would ever build a large assembly plant today where low land costs and cheap labor along with tax breaks from local governments is the way to go to lower production costs.
NIMBYism is a silent killer.
I had a 2006 Corolla that was built here. It was such a solid car, wish I never sold it.
4:43 Small correction: The gent in that picture is Akio Toyoda, son of Tatsuro Toyoda and he was Toyota’s CEO from 2009 to mid 2023. He has beenreplaced by Koji Sato, former Lexus and Gazoo Racing president.
Small correction for you: Akio Toyoda is the son of Shoichiro Toyoda. Shoichiro and Tatsuro are brothers. Their father was Kiichiro, who was the founder of Toyoda Motors in 1933. In 1933 Toyoda Motors was a division of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works which had been founded in 1926 by his father, Sakichi Toyoda.
Like their cars, Toyoda family members have been long lived except for Kiichiro who died at 57 from a cerebral hemorrhage (stroke) caused by a chronic disease. After Kiichiro's death in 1952, his cousin Eiji, an engineer by training, took over running the company until 1994. Eiji lived to 100, Shoichiro to 97, Tatsuro to 88.
Small correction, the photo of Tatsuro Toyoda is actually Akio Toyoda.
A GM employee who was in upper management in Michigan told me Toyota learned how to do quality paint systems in a palate of colors from the NUMMI Fremont plant. That is Technology transfer.
How much of Toyota's "Japaneseness" was based on Edward Demmings work which was ignored in America?
The foundations were built upon Demming's pioneering ideas in statistical process control, but by the time it went from Japan back to America in the form of TPS, it was(and is) very distinctly Japanese both in terms of culture and terminology. A lot of the terminology don't have clean English translations and requires some exposition to fully explain.
How much of Japanese-ness is the ability to "culturally appropriate" the good while leaving behind the bad, whether that's society-wide sociocultural stuff or corporate culture stuff, and the ability for management to actually recognize valuable innovations such as Deming's work and adopt them, instead of fighting it until they finally die and are replaced by their less ossified prior subordinates who recognized it the whole time but couldn't implement it
Japan has always been able to take ideas 'produced' abroad and make it their own. The process, including but not limited to JIT, Kaizen, and Kanban, are all Japanese in origin. The basis being on Deming's while important is moot because the western countries decided to ignore an academic who had basically taken the statistical analysis field in a new direction which the Japanese manufacturing industry took to practice.
@@choilive Also worth mentioning, the failure of most Western non-Japanese firms to do the full JIT instead of a lazier, simplified version that didn't fully or even hardly at all take into account supply chain variables is how they/we suffered as badly as we did during and after COVID-19. Many, though far from all, are adapting and improving there somewhat.
Tldr the difference was, the extreme of what I'm talking about, firms decided JIT not only meant just-in-time (for delivery / demand of the final product) manufacture; it came to also mean placing orders from suppliers of components and whatever other "ingredients" are required to manufacture that product, at the last possible time to try to maintain no inventory of those as well. This of course means that a hiccup there, means a failure to actually achieve JIT manufacture of your product.
Actually, JIT is not designed to handle supply chain shocks like what happened in COVID. JIT requires a statistically predictable flow of parts in the right place at the right time. This is required to eliminate the need for large inventory buffers that would normally be able to handle supply chain shocks.
This has been a well known compromise of the system and it works well most of the time. It just so happens that black swan events like a pandemic REALLY throws a wrench in the whole operation.
For example: You expect Part A to arrive in 1 month from the supplier at the 3 sigma confidence level, but Part A actually ends up taking 6 months to arrive. You have very little inventory of Part A because you follow JIT, and Part A is required for you complete your Widget. Your entire production line is now stuck. Amplify this problem by the hundreds or thousands of parts in your BOM... you can see how it implodes very quickly.
11:10 The poo poo mountain analogy killed me 😂
Excellent video. Well organized, informative and great pacing. Thank you.
billy joel: we're living here in allen town...
The American union story, in general, is a sad protracted saga of continuous absurd self sabotage.
It's always been selfish and confrontational because that's how the corporate-political alliance treated workers back then, and often still does today.
@@doujinflip Still doesn't change the fact that a union who doesn't try to strike a fair balance (like here where different factions within the union where having competitions on who could annoy management the most) between worker rights and worker responsibility will eventually self sabotage.
Damn this was interesting ass all crap!
I hope very much your channel does very well!
Not only was this so informative it pieced together certain aspects of information so throughly that… I am remembering those in my life who gave me a tidbit here or a tidbit there.
Might sound super vague but this brought back childhood memories of people important in my life who have now passed.
Liked and subscribed forsure!
This is American Life
I'm Ira Glass
. . . In today's episode ~
I am still driving a NUMMI built car, Pontiac Vibe aka Toyota Matrix. It definitely has the Toyota quality written all over it. Sad the plant closed for a period. It hit the Fremont economy pretty hard during that time until Tesla went in there.
I love the Pontiac Vibe so much that I have two of them. However, I don't seem to remember that being mentioned in the narration. Such an versatile car.
My mom has an 09' Matrix S awd (Built in Canada) it's pretty fun to drive, and carry alot of stuff. The body kit, rear spoiler and 18" wheels make it look pretty good too.
@@darrenlane6316 true! The vibe is the golden boy of that plant!
I'm glad you pointed out the issues with the UAW. While 80s GM cars were hardly desirable, the UAW was and still is one of the biggest cancers on the American car industry. While the initial purpose of a union is noble, the UAW is a perfect example of why you don't want unions to get _too_ powerful.
As someone that's spent 2.5 decades in a union myself the union cares about itself first, lobbying for democrats second, and it's members a distant third. Actually making a quality product for your employer isn't even on the list.
Every time they fight for raises my union itself wants a bigger and bigger cut. There was even a year where they negotiated a .50 raise from owners but the union wanted more so they took $1 from the worker effectively giving us a .50 pay _CUT_ while my boss was paying more. Then their pension is a Ponzi scheme that only rewarded the good old boys that set it up and now it's only 50% funded towards what they've promised and decreases every year. I'll be lucky if it still exists by the time I retire.
This is precisely why many Toyota and Honda plants in the US are NOT UAW plants, while Ford, GM, and Chrysler keep pouring money into that pit of corruption. It's honestly surprising they can even compete with foreign brands when their labor costs are psychotically higher.
Not the worst summary of union duplicity & dysfunction I've ever read. 😬😀
Allow me to offer a minor correction, being from Australia - Toyota started manufacturing here in 1958. I’ve since learnt Toyota’s first manufacturing plant outside of Japan was in Brazil.
So is Volkswagen's first plant outside of Germany was in Brazil in the 1950s making the first Volkswagen Beetle outside of Germany.
You do great work. Very impressed by your research for this video. (And your editing is impeccable.)
The Toyota Way.
That just in time parts system was pretty much adopted by every company and worked well until recently. The industry hit the black swan know as the pandemic. Cars sat in lots, unable to be sold due to parts shortages. This caused car prices to explode, and for a while, you could actually sell your used car for more than you purchased it for.
it's more complicated than that, especially when it comes to electronics used in the car business.
Efficiency and resiliency are competing interests. You get what you pay for especially when a shock comes by.
Notice that Toyota had no supply shortages because they had properly buffered critical parts. Only poorly managed companies like Ford had supply problems.
@@haveaseatplease Companies anticipated low demand and canceled orders. When demand came back they struggled to get their parts because everyone now wanted their orders and chip fabs had already allocated the production to other customers. There was also pandemic related factory and port shutdowns but if everyone had kept a buffer of parts, things wouldn't have been as bad overall. I'd be interested in your take to expand my understanding.
Part of this is American companies implementing JIT on everything, even things that Toyota does not. Even Toyota over time has changed how much they store some things. It's all about lead time and complexity of the production chain. Stamped metal pieces, rubber seals, and windows do not take long to ramp up and down productivity. Electronic chips have lead times that can extend many months from order to final product, and to increase productivity takes years and tons of money with very expensive machinery that takes a year to make.
Toyota did not have nearly the same issues many American automakers had. But there were shortages of tons of different things affecting every industry. Even simple stuff eventually caught up to gt Toyota some.
Tesla didn't do the same thing many American automakers did with reducing orders. And since a lot of components are made in house by them, they just needed raw material availability which was better off than more complete components. The chip shortage did eventually affect them, but since they use those chips on their own components with their own firmware and software, they were able to switch to other electronics not directly compatible. Stuff like PLCs, microcontrollers, and other chip related shortage things, they were able to make compatible firmware to work in their cars and get around supply issues much better than others.
My car was built in this factory
A Tesla Model S or X? 😅
@@rkan2 Geo Prizm
Most companies get the union they deserve.
True. Not having any union in a company is quite concerning though (except when it's a cooperative where every workers is a patron). Sounds like union busting is in progress.
Large companies do their upmost best to compromise the union by bribing or corrupting union leaders. Go and read on the way GM corrupted and bought the important union leaders at each plant.
If selfish confrontational management is what what the workers get, selfish confrontational workers is what management receives.
Union/management relations are a beast unto their own. Our union company relations are largely better than most.
The US and Australia had car industries due to Protectionist policy and Corporate Welfare...Japan has one based on MERIT.
My Japanese van is 33 years old, has 390000kms up, and is the most excellent vehicle I have ever owned.
2:49 man, that report doesn't pull punches. Though, from the video, it's more because of the company culture in US factories.
I owned a NUMMI-built car, a 2004 Pontiac Vibe GT, from new until 2021. The day I drove it off the dealership lot was its last day at the dealer. It ran flawlessly, never requiring any warranty work or any repairs other than wear items and general maintenance, for almost 200,000 miles. Had GM still had an option for a NUMMI vehicle, I would have strongly considered it rather than the Toyota product I replaced it with.
my Pontiac Vibe are made here, still no rattle and never broke down, great car.
Toyota's frequently mentioned as the original source when "kanban" systems are being taught in software and games development. Essentially cards/post-its in columns, each representing units of work, and gradually making their way from "backlog" to "done"
Once owned a car made at NUUMI. Excellent car, served me well years and sold it to a friend who put way more miles on it than I ever had. GM had a winner with the Corolla Prizm, so of course GM did the smart thing and introduced the same-sized subcompact Cadavalier, I mean, Cavalier into the same market segment and drop the far far better Prizm. Idiocy. Typical GM.
Add up how many bailouts American car companies have had to beg the taxpayer for, and it's in the billions. Much of that money never paid back, but boy! Did the CEOs and top management make millions of $ in the meantime and all retired with lavish pensions, health care plans, country club memberships for life and more.
I have a NUMMI car -- a 1988 Chevy Nova "Twin Cam." It's a peppy little beast and fun to drive because it's a stick shift. It's not my daily driver but i like it. They only made 3,400 of them, so it has some collector value too.
I toured the NUMI plant before it closed, and I toured it again after Tesla started making cars there. I also went back their to pick up my wife's Tesla later.
It's an urban legend that the name Nova was a deterrent to Spanish speaking car buyers.
Mexicans love their Chevys.
Nova means new in Latin. I doubt it means no-go in Spanish.
It does. No va
@@alejandrobolanos4655 lol id expect them to name it nocamino
@@alejandrobolanos4655It means that, technically, but it isn't really a regular phrase. The original Nova sold just fine in Spanish language countries.
It's really sad seeing this dumb old myth STILL being repeated decades later.
GM is profit motivated. Toyota is quality motivated.
Love your touching on the big 3, as a lifelong Michigander I’m sick of their propaganda.
I drive older japanese cars for a lot of reasons. New cars have gotten impossibly complex to repair creating an imo throw away culture around cars. I pay mechanic bills due to age, but you need to know how to turn a wrench, not turn a wrench+be a computer whiz.
Current daily is a trusty old 1994 mr2 gt-s, if it does break down its makes sense as to why. The old toyotas are very well built/engineered, even though the car looks fancy in person its arguably a cost saver
You don't have to be a computer whiz to work on modern cars...All you need to know is what the different data streams are and how to interpret them. Computers aid is diagnostics by pointing you in a general direction of a problem. Sounds like you're just a tad lazy to take a few minutes to pick up a $20 scanner and do a little bit of research. I've been working on my own cars for the last 10 years and the car's computer has helped myself numerous times. If you think modern cars are so bad, why is there so many Toyota models with 300k+ miles that were made in the past 15 years? You definitely don't see that with GM, Ford, or Jeep/Dodge. Nothing is impossible if you actually do some research and put in some effort.
Had an '86 Camry you could drain the drain the oil with all 4 tires on the ground it was sweet.
Just on a FYI basis: the movie "Gung Ho" starring Michael Keaton was set in the background of "Japanese car maker in the US".
Still living in the UK at the time I recall the time when British Leyland, whose work ethics was probably marginally better than GM Fremont and the products marginally worse, got into a joint venture with Honda, which helped it a fair bit. Nissan started a brand new factory in Sunderland, and it is still going despite a scare a couple of years ago.
BL's work ethic was def not better than GM's . They went on strike way more often , & for way pettier reasons such as a bathroom was missing toilet paper or there was no tea in a break room
@@bigmedge I suppose I still haven't lost my British habit of understatement!
Such a tragic trainwreck too, which killed many marques and huge manufacturing capabilities of the UK once all the dust settled.
We know it’s going to be a nice commute to work when we see that Asianometry uploads a video.
I'm on a train on my way to work right now.
Up until 1986 I was a GM loyalist so I bought a Chevy Nova. Boy did that car teach me how reliable and durable Toyota mechanical components were. So ironically, GM taught me, via their Nova, that Toyotas were superior. I have been a Toyota loyalist ever since.
If only GM and others had listened to Edward Demming like the Japanese did.
I do wonder if there could be a video summarizing Toyota's activities in Indonesia, with the notable models being their AUVs, Kijang and Avanza...
Toyota works everywhere with the same system,so in Indonesia to!
Toyota the best
I own a 1999 Toyota Tacoma Limited extra cab 4x4 3.4 v6 that was built at that plant. I bought it 5 years ago and it has been one of the better pickups I have owned. It has not stranded me yet
I had a company car Pontiac vibe built there. It was the best company car I ever had in my 40 years with that employer (they only get cars from the "big 3")
I don't think the model name "Nova" was a hindrance to selling in an English speaking country like the US. GM had other cars with the Nova name prior that sold well.
Right, Chevy used that model name going back to 1962.
It's complete BS, and didn't belong in an otherwise-good video.
Only by sending the workers to Japan to train would they see with their own eyes how the system works and that it indeed did work. Lee Iacocca couldn't convince Chrysler workers of the quality that could be achieved, so stubborn were they that out of frustration he drove a Toyota onto the production floor to convince them.
If they'd only listened more to him instead of constantly fighting with him.
When I asked a motoring journalist why there is still a quality isse with US cars he said it probably comes down to the workers, so are they listening today or has nothing changed?@@davef.2329
This video is very interesting on the question of technological transfer. The Japanese have been practicing this since the days of the black fleet! It might not have been Deming it might have been Perry (LoL). The Japanese sent students out to learn and invited experts to to teach and pass their knowhow. They cherry picked the best technologies - warships the UK, for the Army - the French, for artillery Germany. ...etc. Once they had learned from them the foreign experts were paid off and sent home. By the early 1900s Japan had defeated a major European power on land and at sea and had their own colonies. This is not to say that they made no mistakes or were wrongheaded.
Many of the things we know from Japan had their roots in Japanese attitudes towards customers and quality in the Meji era industrialisation and I wonder whether Deming's work fell on fertile ground rather than been revolutionary.
An interesting question would be why innovation and technical transfer were not taken up. In my personal case its the years of bombarded with innovation and mindless blather by tech gurus and Directors of possibilities who are unable to produce anything of real use. I imaging the autoworks saw the utility of the Toyota system - that it made sense to them.
“Just in time” presumes uninterrupted supplier deliveries. It didn’t function so well during the pandemic, and probably won’t during other global disruptions.
I wonder whether Toyota has become the new GM. Here in Australia, the Chinese offer fairly comparable cars for about 2/3rds of the price of a Toyota now. That's a hell of a lot, and it makes you think - even if you'd normally never consider a native Chinese brand. $10-20K AUD less for a small to mid-size car is just hard to ignore. Toyota is also struggling to provide hybrids, with waiting times of up to 18 months for something like an RAV4. You could argue that this is because of their popularity - or, conversely, you could argue that their manufacturing planning wasn't up to the job. In any case, the Chinese will benefit from this because THEY can provide hybrids with short waiting times or even straight away. And the number of deliveries is scaling up fast - e.g. MG is now the 6th biggest brand here - in front of Kia. GWM will overtake Subura within the next few months. It'll be interesting to see what the automotive landscape will look like in 10y.
You get what you pay for, and Chinese brands aren't known for their reliability and durability even in China. So it depends how disposable you think a car should be.
@@doujinflip The same was said about the Japanese back in the day. The "trash" period is pretty much over if you can believe the usual review sites here in Oz. Feel free to google reviews of the Tank 300 or BYD Seal.
I, for one, don't intend to buy a Chinese car, but numerous others do.
In 10 years you basically won’t be able to “easily” own a private car because of the lie masquerading as saving the planet
@@klausschroiff4405these cap cars are blatant knock offs
@@doujinflip
Only for the ill-informed and misguided and traitors in the PRC ... which falsely think/believe that way about their products .
I believe the concept that separates Japanese, at least Toyota, is Kaizen. It’s a belief and a practice. American automakers haven’t quite figured that out.
I had one of those Chevy Novas built there, it was a great little economy car. Very reliable and durable.
The Toyota quality program was a study for all US businesses Harley Davidson, GM, so many companies learned from Toyotas quality programs and processes we did also in our business great model to study and leverage
Excellent work 👏 👍 👌 😊😊
Your first photo of Tatsuro Toyoda was not correct - you showed a photo of Akio Toyoda instead of Tatsuro. Your second photo of Tatsuro in the Chevy Nova was correct. Overall the presentation was excellent.
Another excellent piece of obscure but important history. Well done as always. Thanks.
Unions every time.....